River City Love Song

There’s a sort of sin to suburbia.

What’s the draw of fences and well-manicured lawns and the watered down colours of obscurity? What’s the appeal of two cars and a 40-minute commute? Cookie-cutter houses and anything green landscaped into oblivion as traffic trickles along golf-course roads…

Even scarred through by paved trails, the heart of this city is wilder, so much wilder than that.

Is the sprawl an escape, then? Taking refuge in carefully laid-out streets and cul-de-sacs from the inexorable, inescapable river… I suppose some people prefer soporific domestication to the alternative. The breathtaking glitter of the alternative: sunlight on the river, neon on storm-puddles, moonlight on snow.

It could be any city — it isn’t any city. It’s this city. This schizophrenic collective, this glass and wire prism. This rustling of leaves and laughing of magpies. Nature covered in cement covered in art depicting nature. And the river as the undercurrent, the sub-stratum, the constant and changing foundation. The thing we can’t tame or deny.

Even in the oversaturated false light of the ‘burbs, there’s no forgetting it. It haunts the faint music of wind chimes. And dusk, when it falls, is a river-twilight, carving a path like water beneath the endless Alberta sky.